Here’s a corner building constructed from two casts of my 1930’s building facade. I’ve painted it in creme interior housepaint, Kiwi shoe polish (for an aging effect) and a couple of Citadel colours – Snot Green for the roof and awning and Fortress Grey for the pavement. The walls were painted using exactly the same technique I employed for my older 40k CD terrain piece.

This is a bit of a poor photo of the building, hastily snapped under interior sodium lighting, my apologies for the slightly odd angle too. I’ll be taking better shots once I’ve finished up the final detailing. All I have left to do is construct a couple of panelled doors from plasticard and a couple of shop windows from blister plastic, which I’ll be attempting to decorate with some painted or drawn pin striping and suitable signage.

To be honest I’m getting a little tired of working on this particular piece of terrain, which for me is typically a good sign it’s about time to wrap it up! I hope to finish it this week and then borrow some friend’s Flames of War figures for some scale shots.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I handed Jonathan the first cast out of the 1930’s 15mm facade mold. Despite the fact it was a throw away piece, it’s nice to see he’s already well on the way to creating a ruined building for his Flames of War Germans.

Now I think about it I guess it’s fair he gets the first cast to play with since it was a forum conversation with him back in June last year that started the ball rolling on the building facade!

I’m looking forward to seeing his piece finished and painted. Of course I’ve started making my own facade terrain piece as well, although I’m shooting for an intact building complete with glass windows, a shop awning and a solid front door. I might have to do some research to come up with appropriate European signs as well.

Hopefully between the two of us we can create some nice demo pieces for the facade.

I have changed my pricing from NZ$ to US$ as almost every order I receive for my 15mm WWII terrain comes from International visitors. I hope using US$ will make it easier to understand our prices.

It also makes things easier for me, as I receive payment via PayPal in US$ anyway. Plus of course it means my sales are also less prone to the vagaries of International exchange rates.

I have also waived the minimum order restriction as it seems foolish for me to be declining sales because of order size.

Prices have been slightly tweaked to reflect the cost of materials and relative difficulty of casting some pieces, particularly the resin kits as the molds I use tend to have a limited life due to the harshness of polyurethane resin.

Finally I intend to release the 15mm 1930’s building facade for sale shortly (once I’ve built up stock). It will be available for $16US for a single large 15mm facade casting in Ultracal 30.

Earlier this week I finally molded the 15mm building facade I’ve been working on since last year. If it seems like the blog posts have slowed down a little it’s because finishing this master has been occupying all of my modelling time.

Anyway, it’s finally done and here’s a rough photo of the second Ultracal 30 cast, fresh out of the mold. It’s so fresh the Ultracal isn’t completely dry which is why it’s that odd mottled gray colour. Dry Ultracal casts are white.

If you’re wondering what happened to the first cast, it was a give away and Jonathan nabbed it. I find the first plaster cast out of any mold I’ve made generally has a lot of issues with air bubbles, however the second cast is usually fine. It’s like the first cast tempers the mold somehow, possibly leaving a plaster residue behind that makes it harder for bubbles to adhere to the rubber in later casts.

I’m happy to see my master molds well in Ultracal 30. I did have some concerns about the window frames, which is why they’re a little over scale for 15mm windows, but they demolded without difficulty. In fact there’s only two small issues with the large shop window frame, both of which are fixable. Other than that the casting is pristine, which bodes well for future production casts. I’m glad all that modelling effort didn’t go to waste! This is by far the largest and most complex master I’ve constructed to date and I’m pretty happy with it. On showing it to the Garage Gamers there were appreciative comments all round which is a good sign considering they’re all Flames of War gamers too.

I’ve now got to commit some modelling time to building a couple of demo pieces. One which will get attacked with a hammer and reduced to ruins and the other which I’ll try to model largely intact, with maybe a few light bullet holes around the doors and windows. I also need to build some brick side and rear walls and mold/cast them too for a complete building set.

However I’m likely to offer individual facades for sale on the blog by the end of January, so stay tuned if you’re interested. I also plan to build some more variations on this theme, so our city streets don’t look too cookie cutter. In fact I already have an alternate set of 15mm columns ready to use.

Black or White primer?

* 62% (73) – Black primer!
* 18% (21) – White primer!
* 19% (22) – Gray primer!
* 2% (2) – Some other colour?!

Total Votes : 118

Of all the random polls I’ve run on this blog, this one has been the first that totally defied my expectations. I’ve always used a white primer on figures, apart from one failed experiment with black priming GW Skaven several years ago. However it would seem I’m very clearly in the minority as almost two thirds of the poll respondents use a black primer.

I’ll admit a black primer is probably more forgiving during painting, allowing you to get away with a few crimes. I know this for a fact because I primed most of my Mordheim terrain to a solid black prior to drybrushing. Although I find a good ink wash after applying the base colours over a white prime has pretty much the same effect. I mainly prime white simply because it’s easier to cover with the base coat and gives most colours a nice ‘lift’.

To the black primers out there, do you find it difficult to get good coverage from your colours over black? Are you applying multiple coats of base colours to cover it? Here’s another question, if you’re currently black priming now, have you tried white priming in the past? Also, does anybody out there use black and white priming for different figures? A final priming question: I imagine the 19% of people priming gray are using cheap auto primer, but what on earth are the two visitors that answered ’some other colour’ using?!

The next poll is a question I’m sure a lot of people will be happy to avoid:

How many unfinished armies do you own?

My current hall of shame goes like this:

• 28mm GW Warhammer Fantasy
  • Vampire Counts
  • Orcs and Goblins
• 28mm GW Warhammer 40k
  • Imperial Guard (only been 18 years now)
  • Nurgle Chaos
  • Tyranids
• 15mm Flames of War
  • New Zealanders (almost finished, just some gun tractors and lorries to paint)
  • DAK Armored
• 15mm Ancients
  • Romans
  • Carthaginians

Hence my plan to get more painting and less purchasing done in 2007!

Late last year I posted a mock up of a 15mm 1930’s building facade I was casting resin parts for. Over the Xmas/New Year break I’ve made a fair amount of progress on the actual master for this building, so here it is! It looks a bit patchy because like most masters it’s constructed from various materials.

The basic wall is a slab of Ultracal 30 that was cast from a simple plasticard mold with inserts for the window and door spaces. That was then tidied up with a little filing and the resin windows dropped in. The wall is in the process of being decorated with vertical columns and horizontal panels created from thin resin pieces. All of the windows, panels and columns also need to be patched with green stuff prior to molding and there’s several blue pencil lines that need to be replaced with plasticard detailing at the top.

The ground floor is intended to represent a shop door and display window. The window has an inset frame to hold a piece of clear plastic in place for window glass. I’d like to try using a technical pen to to apply some old fashioned pin striping to the window in a demo painted piece, but that might be a touch challenging in 15mm! I also need to master a suitable panelled wooden door for the building as well.

This whole facade will be molded and cast in Ultracal 30 as a single piece. The beauty of doing this is Ultracal is superb for applying ruin effects too. Bullet holes, blast marks and etching on exposed brick work will all be possible with a little work. I suspect in my early runs half of the casts will be used to make intact buildings, and half will be attacked with a hammer! It might be nice to try creating a pair of before and after buildings too.

I hope to have the facade finished and molded before January ends at which point it’ll go up on the order page and I’ll start painting several demo pieces.

I’ve had an airbrush setup in my garage since last year, so it’s probably time I started learning how to use it. Over the weekend I applied a coat of GW ‘Vermin Brown’ thinned with car windscreen wiper fluid to the EBob Miniatures Opel Blitz that keeps appearing on the blog.

I experienced first hand the difficulties of controlling air and paint flow in a cheap double action airbrush. I also followed somebody’s excellent advice about test spraying your colours onto scrap card or foam board before applying them to whatever it is you actually want to airbrush. In fact I found the best way to do this is to set up your test card and model side by side in the spray booth (aka large cardboard box) and simply travel from one to the other once you’re happy with the paint delivery.

People always talk about airbrushes not requiring a lot of paint to cover surfaces and man they’re not kidding. It took me roughly three large dabs of Vermin Brown to cover this entire 1:56th vehicle. Albiet in a slightly patchy and haphazard manner.

If you’re wondering why I’m painting the truck a rust colour it’s because this is a base undercoat. Over this I’m going to dab Marmite using a torn sponge (yeap, Marmite) and then overpaint it with a Tamiya Desert Yellow spray can and finally some misted GW ‘Bleached Bone’ highlights with the airbrush. Then I’ll wait for the whole mess to dry, and scrub the truck with a toothbrush in some warm soapy water.

The Marmite dissolves and washes off, carrying off the topcoats and exposing the rust coat underneath. This was an interesting weathering tip that I originally read in Model Military International. Hopefully I can get it to work for me on this vehicle.